The CREAM lab organizes a short, impromptu workshop on the biology, cultural history, musicality and acoustic of !screams!, to be held in IRCAM, Paris, on Thursday 22nd June, 2-5pm. The workshop will consist of four invited talks, followed by a discussion around drinks and cakes.

Exciting news! As of March 2017, DAVID, our emotional voice transformation tool, is available as a free download on the IRCAM Forum, the online community of all science and art users of audio software developped in IRCAM. This new plateform will provide updates on the latest releases of the software, and better user support. In addition, we’ll demonstrate the software at the IRCAM Forum days in Paris on March 15-17, 2017. Come say hi! (and sound all very realistically happy/sad/afraid) if you’re around.

These talks are organised in the context of a workshop on reverse-correlation for high-level audio cognition, to be held in IRCAM the same days (on-invitation-only). Both talks are free for all, in IRCAM (1 Place Stravinsky, 75004 Paris). Details (titles, abstract) are below.

A recently emerging view in music cognition holds that music is not only social and participatory in its production, but also in its perception, i.e. that music is in fact perceived as the sonic trace of social relations between a group of real or virtual agents. To investigate whether it is at all the case, we asked a group of free collective improvisers from Conservatoire Supérieur National de Musique et de Danse de Paris (CNSMDP) to try to communicate a series of social attitudes (being dominant, arrogant, disdainful, conciliatory or caring) to one another, using only their musical interaction. Both musicians and non-musicians were able to recognize these attitudes from the recorded music.

The study, a collaboration between Clément Canonne and JJ Aucouturier, was published today in Cognition. The corpus of 100 improvised duets used in the study is also available online: http://cream.ircam.fr/?p=575